Bending and vibration of functionally

graded material sandwich plates

using an accurate theory
S. Natarajan, M. Ganapathi
(Submitted on 12 Mar 2012)

In this paper, the bending and the free flexural

vibration behaviour of sandwich functionally
graded material (FGM) plates are investigated
using QUAD-8 shear flexible element developed
based on higher order structural theory. This
theory accounts for the realistic variation of the
displacements through the thickness. The
governing equations obtained here are solved for
static analysis considering two types of sandwich
FGM plates, viz., homogeneous face sheets with
FGM core and FGM face sheets with
homogeneous hard core. The in-plane and rotary
inertia terms are considered for vibration studies.
The accuracy of the present formulation is tested

considering the problems for which threedimensional elasticity solutions are available. A
detailed numerical study is carried out based on
various higher-order models to examine the
influence of the gradient index and the plate
aspect ratio on the global/local response of
different sandwich FGM plates.